User pays 1000x fee to send 4 BTC

Fat fingers? One Bitcoin (BTC) user spent over $200 to make a transaction, paying astronomically above average fees.

In a transaction that entered Bitcoin block 760,077, a user paid 1,136,000 satoshis, (0.0136 BTC or $220.52) to move 3.8 BTC ($63,000). This extraordinarily high fee is a whopping 1,000 times the normal Bitcoin transaction fee, since at block height 760,077 the average transaction fee was about $0.20.

Twitter user Bitcoin QnA first spotted the unusual transaction, traces, “Tho?” The Bitcoin guru told Cointelegraph that “Ultimately, we will never know [why they paid high], but there are some possible answers.” QnA listed the following:

“1. Using a wallet with terrible fee calculations 2. A user making a typo when entering the fee rate manually 3. An exchange processing a rush payout. They often overpay, but usually never by that much!”

Finally, QnA told Cointelegraph that it could be that the user hasn’t done their homework, and the error can be explained by “a user who doesn’t understand how miner fees work (unlikely given the amounts seen in the tx in question).”

Transaction fees on the Bitcoin base chain range from pennies to hundreds of dollars, depending on congestion levels in the Bitcoin memory pool, or “mem pool,” as well as transaction sizes. Transaction fees are priced in satoshis per unit of data, abbreviated to sats/vByte.

The Rate/vByte rate is multiplied by the size of the transaction to get the total fee you pay. Generally speaking, the more money (or data) sent, the higher the transaction fee – although several other factors come into play.

If a user is in a hurry, they can choose to pay a higher rate/vByte fee to almost guarantee that miners will include their transaction in the next confirmed block. The cost of this luxury is a higher fee rate. The lowest fee is 1 rate/vByte; higher charges are generally considered to be anything above 7 rates/vByte. For this fat-fingered Bitcoiner, they paid a whopping 8,042 sat/byte, or 1,136,000 sats.

That’s more than 1,000 times the typical fee. The median transaction fee for block 760,077 was ~8 sat/vB or $0.22.

Related: Average Bitcoin Transaction Fee Falls Below $1 As Network Issues Recover

Upon further investigation, the same wallet was involved in another Bitcoin transaction 40 minutes prior that also paid an exorbitant fee. The wallet transferred 4.28 BTC ($83,000) for 564,096 rate or (0.056 BTC or $109). Miners received a rate of 4,022 sat/vB for the pleasure, adding the payment to block 760,073.

Due to the pseudonymity of the Bitcoin blockchain, it is unclear why the user paid such a high transaction fee. It is also not clear why they repeated the same action four quarters later. As a final suggestion, QnA joked that it could be “a rich Bitcoiner doing it to bend (unlikely).”